Acrobat for Legal ProfessionalsThe Acrolaw Blog is a resource for lawyers, law firms, paralegals, legal IT pros and anyone interested in the use of Acrobat in the legal community. Rick Borstein, blog author, is a Principal Solutions Consultant with Adobe Systems Incorporated.2015-02-04T02:12:03Zhttp://blogs.adobe.com/acrolaw/feed/atom/WordPressRick Borsteinhttp://blogs.adobe.com/acrolaw/?p=10192015-02-03T02:19:33Z2015-02-04T02:12:03ZContinue reading →]]>A request for my blog readers . . .

If you find a post with a missing file, please let me know.

The best way to do so is to a Post a Comment to the article. Please include the URL when you do and a description of the issue.

Thanks!

Rick

]]>0Rick Borsteinhttp://blogs.adobe.com/acrolaw/?p=9962015-02-03T02:06:31Z2015-02-03T02:06:31ZContinue reading →]]>Most of us are familiar with typical document sizes such as letter (8.5″ by 11″), legal (8.5″ by 14″) and ledger/tabloid (11″ by 17″).

A recent email I received made me realize that not everyone knows how to actually format their documents to match:

I have the attached document that I need to output at 14 inches wide by 14 inches high. When I print to PDF, there is not a choice for this. I’ve attached the Word file so you can take a look . . .

When I opened the document, I realized that the document was set to Letter size in landscape orientation (11″ by 8.5″). I was able to work with the customer to find a solution, so I thought I would share it here.

Setting the Page Size in Microsoft Office

If you are using an Office application, such as Word, Excel or PowerPoint, you should create and edit your document at the desired print dimensions. That way, your editing process will reflect the physical page size.

When you change the page size in Word, the layout will adjust automatically and text will reflow.

Here’s how to change the page size of a document in Word. This is for Office 2013, but 2007 and 2010 versions are substantially identical.

Go to the Page Layout Ribbon in Word

Click the Size button

Choose More Page Sizes at the bottom

Enter your desired page size and click OK

Click the Acrobat ribbon in Word

Click Create PDF

Checking the Page Size in Acrobat

Acrobat will convert the document to the exact page size specified in Word.

Here’s how to check. With the file open . . .

File> Properties

Click the Description tab

The PDF Page size is listed:

Using the PDF Printer and Preserving Page Size

Maintaining page size is tricker when printing via the AdobePDF printer. For example, when I created a 5.25 X 7.25 custom page size and printed to the PDF printer, the output looked like this:

It is possible to maintain the PDF page size by creating a custom page size for the PDF Printer. Here’s how . . .

Create your document in the tool of your choice and make note of the page size

Choose File>Print

Select the AdobePDF Printer

Click the Settings option for the Adobe PDF Printer
Note: The labeling and position of this option will vary depending upon the application used

Choose the new page size from the Adobe PDF Page Size menu and click OK.

Print the document. The results should match the page size:

Note: Word and other applications may complain about margins and paper size when you go to print.. You can ignore these issues.

In my testing, the page size setting wasn’t “sticky”, at least in Word. That’s probably a good thing since I think most of us create standard letter-size and other documents.

]]>0Rick Borsteinhttp://blogs.adobe.com/acrolaw/?p=9822015-01-07T21:46:33Z2015-01-07T21:45:11ZContinue reading →]]>Clients and customers often review PDFs on their mobile phones. Perhaps you’ve sent an Intake Agreement to your client which they open on their iPhone or Android device. Your client then has a question and they want to call you.

Your phone number appears on the PDF you sent, but your client needs to know how to copy it, then paste it into the dialer application on their phone. That’s a hassle. Wouldn’t it be great if they could simply click the phone number in the PDF and dial the phone?

Yep, that’s possible! This capability is also very useful to add to your marketing brochures. Why not make it easy for potential clients to contact you?

Add a Phone Dialer Link to a PDF

You can add a special URL to a link so that it will dial the phone. Here’s how to add a “Dial the Phone” URL in Acrobat.

Open a PDF document
A) Choose the Selection tool
B) Highlight a phone number

With the phone number highlighted, right-click and choose “Create Link”:

The Create Link window opens.
A) Set the Link Action to”Open a Web Page”
B: Click the Next button

Enter the phone number you wish to dial in the following format: tel:3125558888
NOTE: Do not add any spaces or dashes.
A) Enter phone number into URL field
B) Click OK

Save the document.

What happens on the mobile device?

When your client or customer clicks on the phone number, it will open the dialer application on the phone:

I’ve tested this on Adobe Reader Mobile on both Android and iOS, but other PDF viewers may also support this.

If the recipient opens the PDF on a desktop or tablet device, the link will be ignored.

]]>7Rick Borsteinhttp://blogs.adobe.com/acrolaw/?p=9602014-11-13T01:29:00Z2014-11-14T15:00:57ZContinue reading →]]>Acrobat includes a plethora of review tools, but most are not very eye catching. You want your edits to get noticed, right?

Today, I’m sharing a set of 23 stamps that I have designed. These stamps help you call attention to your edits with colorful iconography:

Stamps included in the file

I created the stamps using Adobe Illustrator, so each stamp is a tiny, vector file that scales and prints well. The text has been converted to outlines, so adding a stamp from the supplied file does not embed fonts in your document.

The folders might be hidden . . .

These folder locations may be hidden on your computer, so don’t freak out if you don’t see them at first.

Here are some tips for finding them:

WIN: Open an Explorer window and paste the path into it. Change the USERNAME to your user name and hit enter.MAC: Open your Home folder, then go to the View menu and choose Show View Options. Check Show Library Folder.

On the Mac, you will need to show your Library folder

Another way to find the Stamps folder

An alternate way to find your stamps folder is to have Acrobat tell you where it is located. You can do this from the JavaScript debugger. Here’s how:

Hit CTRL-J (Win) or CMD-J (Mac)

Enter app.getPath(“user”, “stamps”);

Hit CTRL-ENTER (Win) or CMD-Enter (Mac) to see the stamps path

Use the JavaScript debugger to find the stamps folder

Using the Stamps

This part is easy!

Open the Comment pane

Click the Stamp tool

Choose the Review Stamps category

Choose the stamp to place on the document

A few tips for using Stamps

Add a Note to your Stamp

After adding the stamp, double-click it to add a note:

Double-click the note to add a sticky note to it.

Keep the tool selected

This option will keep the Stamp tool selected, but you will need to select the individual stamp needed.

To keep the Stamp tool selected, right-click on it and choose Keep Tool Selected:

Sizing Stamps

Stamps may be sized. Just click and drag to size as you apply them. Or, select the stamp later and drag the handles to scale it.

Stamps may be rotated. After applying the stamp, find the rotation point and drag to rotate the stamp:

List View for Stamps

If you don’t like the gigantic list of stamps with preview, choose “Show Stamp Names” from the Stamp menu to use a slim, text only list:

Choose this option to see a text-only list of stamps

Add the Stamp Tool as a Quick Tool

Quick Tools appear at the top of the document window. Add the Stamps tool so that you don’t need to open the Comments pane.

Right-click on the Stamp tool and choose Add to Quick Tools:

Deleting or Changing the Order of the Stamps

You can re-order or delete stamps in the file.

Open the Review Stamps.pdf file in Acrobat from the your Stamps folder (see above).

Open the Pages panel in Acrobat. Note that the first page is blank. DO NOT DELETE the First page.

To Delete a stamp, select the thumbnail, right-click, and choose Delete Page

To re-0rder the stamps, drag the thumbnail of the page to a new location.

Use the Pages Panel to delete or re-order the stamps file.

Need to know more about working with Stamps?

]]>8Rick Borsteinhttp://blogs.adobe.com/acrolaw/?p=9442014-08-29T02:02:59Z2014-08-29T01:44:59ZContinue reading →]]>Jonathan Schreiber, a very smart colleague of mine who specializes in Adobe EchoSign, asked me if it was possible to list all of the form fields in a PDF. Jonathan was developing an application to map the Acrobat form fields to a custom API for EchoSign.

If you don’t understand what any of that means, don’t worry about it. If you develop PDF forms, it can be useful to have an inventory of all of the fields. That can help you check for errors and better understand tabbing order and naming.

Oddly, although the Forms panel in Acrobat shows a list of them, there is no way to export the list.

So, I cooked up an Acrobat Action which uses a custom JavaScript to write all of the field names, in order, to the JavaScript console:

You can select the text in the Console and copy it into another application or (top tip!) choose Create PDF from Clipboard in Acrobat to create a new PDF listing your fields.

Installing the Action

Some Set-Up

Most folks should be able to use the Action to write the form fields list to the JavaScript Console. However, it wouldn’t hurt to make sure that your JavaScript settings are set correctly so that it works.

Choose Edit>Preferences and select the JavaScript category. On the Mac, choose the Application menu, then Preferences.

Make sure your JavaScript Prefs look like this:

Using the Action

Here’s how to use the List Form Fields action:

Open a PDF with form fields

Open the Tools pane then open the Actions section

Locate the List Form Fields action and click on it

Click the Start button

A few Notes about the Action

The Action works on both AcroForms (traditional Acrobat forms) as well as LiveCycle Designer (XML-based) forms.

If your organization deploys Acrobat with JavaScript turned off and locked, you will not be able to run this Action. If your JavaScript preferences are grayed out, that is likely the case.

]]>0Rick Borsteinhttp://blogs.adobe.com/acrolaw/?p=9302014-07-30T04:55:48Z2014-07-30T04:52:05ZContinue reading →]]>I recently received this query from a customer:

I have assembled over 4000 pages of case data into a single PDF. When I choose Search (CTRL-F) and search for a keyword, it can take a while time to find a word. Is there any way to speed up the search?

Heck yeah! Acrobat Pro allows you to embed a full-text index in a document which greatly accelerates search. The index travels with the document (it’s embedded, duh!). An embedded index speeds up search ten to twenty times.

In this article, I’ll show you how to embed an index in a PDF. You can literally do this in a minute or two!

Note: Acrobat Pro can also create a cross-document index. I’ve written about this before.

Embedding an Index in a PDF

Open the PDF in which you want to embed the index. If the PDF is a scanned document, you should OCR it first.

Open the Tools Pane and click on the Document Processing section:

NOTE: If you don’t see a Document Processing section, click the flyout menu to make the section visible:

In the Document Processing section, choose Manage Embedded Index

The Build window opens. Click the Embed Index button.

Depending on the size of your document, building the index may take a few seconds to a minute or two. Generally, Acrobat indexes very fast.

With that simple change, even the largest PDFs can be searched super-fast.

If you add to your PDF over time, simply update the Embedded Index following the steps above.

Two Kinds of Search

Acrobat offers two variants of search.

FIND allows you to find the next or previous instance of search term. You can get to Find by typing CTRL/CMD-F:

ADVANCED SEARCH returns a search results lists which includes a snippet of the text in context. This is one of the best ways to quickly spot a search term. Advanced Search also includes a number of advanced search features such boolean operators (AND, NOT, OR) and many other remarkable features.

How to use Advanced Search in Acrobat

The best way to get the benefit of faster search with an embedded index is to use Acrobat Advanced Search option.

To get to Advanced Search, choose Edit> Advanced Search or type CTRL-ALT-F on Windows or CMD-OPT-F on the Mac.

In the Advanced Search window, simply type in the word or phrase you are looking for and hit the Search button.

Acrobat will return a contextual hit list of words. Below, I searched for the term “preflight” and found 254 instances in the document.

]]>0Rick Borsteinhttp://blogs.adobe.com/acrolaw/?p=9152014-07-14T20:58:20Z2014-07-14T20:58:20ZContinue reading →]]>I hate filling out paper forms! Not only is my handwriting terrible, but the whole print/scan/send routine is time consuming.

Fortunately, both Adobe Acrobat and Reader have the hand Sign pane which let’s you add text, add checkmarks and sign a document:

While these tools are great, they don’t cover all of the use cases for typical paper forms, for example one like this:

On a paper form, you’d simply circle either Yes or No, but that is missing from the Sign pane in Acrobat. Fortunately, you can easily include a Circle Stamp. The procedure below works in either Adobe Reader XI or Acrobat.

Download the Stamps

Both Reader XI and Acrobat can use existing PDF files as stamps. While Acrobat can convert virtually any artwork to PDF, Reader cannot. To help out, I’ve included three Circle Stamps below (Red, Blue, Black) which you can import and use. Download these to your computer and follow the steps below.

Creating the Custom Stamp

Click Import, and select the stamp file you downloaded from my example above.

Choose a category from the menu or type a new category name (such as My Circle Stamps), name the custom stamp (e.g. Blue Circle), and then click OK.

Apply a stamp

Once you have created the stamp, you can apply it to your document.

Click the Stamp tool. The most recently used stamp is selected.

In the Stamps Palette, choose a category from the menu, and then select a stamp.

Click the document page where you want to place the stamp, or drag a rectangle to define the size and placement of the stamp.

NOTE: If you haven’t provided a name in the Identity preferences, the Identity Setup dialog box prompts you to do so.

Below, I’ve applied the stamp.

Change a stamp’s location or appearance

I purposefully made the stamps included with this article small. When you apply the stamp, you can click and drag to scale it or do os later.

Below are the general instructions for using stamps. Using the Select tool or the Hand tool, you can do any of the following with the stamp selected:

To move a stamp, drag it to a new location.

To resize a stamp, click it, and then drag a corner handle.

To rotate a stamp, click it, move the pointer over the handle at the top of the stamp, and drag when the rotate stamp icon appears.

To delete a stamp, right-click the stamp and choose Delete.

To change the stamp’s opacity or the color of its pop-up note, right-click the stamp, and choose Properties. In the Appearance tab, set the opacity or color.

Creating a “Favorite” Stamp

If you regularly use a Stamp, you can add it to your favorites. It will then appear at the top of the stamp list.

Using the Select tool or the Hand tool, select a stamp markup on the page.

In the Annotations panel, click the Stamp tool and choose Add Current Stamp To Favorites.

Repeatedly using the Same Stamp

Sometimes, you may want to use the circle stamp repeatedly. Use this trick to avoid having to reselect the tool

Right-click on the Stamp Tool and choose “Keep Tool Selected”:

]]>2Rick Borsteinhttp://blogs.adobe.com/acrolaw/?p=8942014-05-08T18:58:21Z2014-05-08T18:50:20ZContinue reading →]]>An Acrobat Shared Review allows multiple people, in real time, to add notes and comments on a PDF. In order to do so, you need a server or shared resources such as SharePoint or a network folder. Both of these are great solutions for behind the firewall reviews.

Occasionally, you may need to have an open review with multiple participants or collaborate with others across multiple domains. For these open reviews, many of our customers used our Acrobat.com service which made the process simple.

In January 2014, we announced that Workspaces on Acrobat.com will be retired in January 2015. That means that Acrobat.com will longer be an option for hosting Shared Reviews. Fortunately, Acrobat supports the WebDav protocol, so that is a great replacement for open reviews which were the forte of Acrobat.com.

I recently purchased a yearly subscription to an inexpensive webdav service from SqueakSoft webdav service. No particular reason, but that came up first in Google and it is only $6 per year.

You can, of course, use webdav on other hosting providers and cloud services.

Here’s how to get started with the SqueakSoft service and getting it working in Acrobat.

Purchase SqueakSoft

Add the service to your cart and complete the transaction. You will be asked to create an account to manage access to the WebDav service and you will also need to create a password for your WebDav service.

It might take a few minutes or more for the service to be activated.

Configuring Acrobat to use the WebDav Service

Open a PDF you want to review in Acrobat

Open the Comments pane, then Send for Shared Review

From the menu, choose: Automatically collect comments on my own internal server

Click the Next button

In the next screen: Choose Web server folder

Type in: http://webdavhost.net/YOURWEBDAVUSERNAME/(replace the all caps text above with the username you created on the SqueakSoft service)You will be prompted for your WebDav username (name you chose in the Cart screen above) and WebDav password.

Click the Next button

Click the Next button TWICE

Name the Server Location anything you want, e.g.: SqueakSoft Open WebDav

What happens on the server?

Acrobat will create a small review folder on the WebDav server which allows all clients to sync comments to it:

Note, in the workflow above, I am suggesting that you email the document to your recipient rather than upload it to the WebDav server. This way, the WebDav server is only used to store the comments, not the document itself. SqueakSoft offers a huge amount bandwidth for a very small amount of money. If you are only using the service to sync the comments (my recommendation), then you would have enough space to conduct many thousands and thousand of reviews.

Each comment is saved as an obfuscated XML file. Anyone who would try to view the comments in a web browser by typing in http://webdavhost.net/YOURWEBDAVUSERNAME/ would be prompted for a log-in.

What is the Shared Review experience like for the recipient?

As part of the process above, the review PDF is emailed to your recipient.

When they open the PDF, they will see a message like this:

The recipient clicks the Connect button, and then is presented some information about the review such as the Review Deadline, review team, etc.:

The document will open and your recipient can and respond to comments made by everyone on the team.

A status bar at the top allows users to publish and retrieve comments which are synchronized to the PDF document in real time:

]]>7Rick Borsteinhttps://blogs.adobe.com/acrolaw/?p=8862014-01-07T23:17:06Z2014-01-07T23:17:02ZContinue reading →]]>I recently received this email from one of my blog readers:

Does Adobe Acrobat have a feature similar to the eraser in the old MS Paint program to edit pdf documents? The feature does exist in ScanSoft Paperport (I have version 11). It is very useful to remove stray marks on scanned images, staple marks, fax headers, punched hole marks, etc. If used with extreme zoom, I can remove just about any marks on the page so it looks like new. However, it would be useful to have all the features in one program. I prefer to use Adobe Acrobat to OCR, and otherwise manage PDF documents, but if they need editing I am forced to use ScanSoft Paperport. Also, the file size seems to go way up after I edit the document with Paperport.

There are two ways you can clean up content in a PDF:

Use the Redaction tools (Acrobat Pro only) and redact using the "No Color" option.See my Redaction Guide for instructions.

Use the Edit Image option and an external editor to clean up the PDF

I’ve never written about the second option previously, so this seems like a good opportunity to do so!

Using an external image editor makes the most sense for image-based PDFs. However, Acrobat can also call a program to edit vector content, too.

Image Editor Preferences

When you first install Acrobat, the installer program searches for compatible editing programs on your Mac or PC.

The install process will select Adobe tools— Photoshop for image editing or Illustrator for vector editing— as the defaults, but you may also use tools like MS Paint.

If you install an image editor after installing Acrobat, you will need to tell Acrobat where to find it.

To view or change your image editor preferences:

Edit> Preferences (Acrobat> Preferences on the Mac)

Go to the Content Editing category

Click the Image Editor button to find a program which can edit images

Click OK

Editing an Image in Acrobat XI

With your image editor preferences set, you are ready to edit an image embedded in a PDF. Note— this will only work on an image within a PDF or on an scanned PDF document..

Open a scanned PDF

Open the Tools panel and then the Content Editing section, then click on Edit Text and Images

Right-click on the page, and choose Edit Using> and select the image editor of your choice:

The image of the page will open in your editor of choice (Photoshop below). Use the appropriate tool(s) such as the eraser tool to clean up the image.

Close the document and the following message (or similar) should appear. Click Yes.

Switch back to Acrobat and the page will update:

Save the file.

Note: Once you save the file, the change is permanent. Work on a copy of the file if you are unsure about what you need to do.

]]>2Rick Borsteinhttps://blogs.adobe.com/acrolaw/?p=8732013-11-27T23:18:34Z2013-11-27T19:03:41ZContinue reading →]]>Adobe® Connect™ is Adobe’s web conferencing platform for web meetings, eLearning, and webinars. My guess is that most legal professionals have taken part in a web conference which allows for computer screen sharing and collaboration. Most large law firms have access to webinar services hosted by one of the major web conferencing platforms such as Adobe Connect, WebEx, Go to Meeting, etc.

One thing that distinguishes Adobe Connect from other web conferencing tools is that Adobe positions it as a development platform. This allows our partners to create some really interesting tools that run on top of the platform to meet the needs of vertical markets.

In fact, when I saw StreamText Legal’s new add-ins for Adobe Connect, I was blown away.

Live Transcripts during your Webinar

I was invited to see a demonstration of a new Adobe Connect add-in from StreamText Legal. This addition to Adobe Connect was specifically built for the legal market.

With StreamText Legal, your webinar includes a live video and audio feed, recorded meetings, court-approved transcripts (in real-time),and the ability to collaborate on PDF documents on the fly. Best of all, it is all very easy to use.

You might wish to check out this interesting case study (PDF) which describes how the court reporting firm Veritext rolled out a new, collaborative court reporting platform using Adobe Connect.

Multi-participant PDF Annotation

Many legal professionals know that Acrobat and Reader offer numerous PDF annotation tools. The developers have created a really robust live, collaborative annotation tool which runs within the web conference. Multiple participants can select live text on the PDF simultaneously and add other annotations such as boxes, highlights, etc.

Future Features

In my chat with the StreamText staff, I asked about the ability to actually transact business within the web conference.

As it turns out, the developers are working on integration with Adobe EchoSign, which will allow for the live signing of agreements.

This will offer law firms to ability to draft documents, get agreement on the terms, and sign them live, completing a transaction in real time.

Benefits of Adobe Connect for the Legal Industry

Adobe Connect paired with

Reduce cost, time and stress associated with travel

Enables for more frequent meetings improving quality and client retention

Allows attorneys to manage larger case loads

Take depositions from anywhere you are with only one requirement, an internet connection

Attorneys can meet “face-to-face” with clients or opposing council while reviewing and marking up documents together, all in a highly secure environment

Attend continuous legal education (CLE) sessions

Use-Cases for Law Firms

Collaboration on PDF documents allowing you to upload a PDF at a moment’s notice. Ability to mark the exhibit with text, annotations, highlights and custom legal stamps and save the modified version locally.

Civil cases: expedite the process if a client is located in another city.

Record and archive meetings for playback as necessary

State and local courts use video conferencing as a cost effective method for communicating with prisoners; it is also safer than busing inmates to court for hearings that can be held remotely.

Access to expert witnesses regardless of location. International reach via video conferencing to get expert testimony without travel.

Meet with people in multiple locations whether it is for a deposition or an internal associate meeting.

Conduct training sessions to entire firm with a single trainer with access to recordings for any who were unable to attend.